Conversion Wednesday – Identify Areas of Improvement (Via Analytics)

By Exclusive Concepts Blog TeamSeptember 29, 2010

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If you dig around in your web analytics, you can become overwhelmed with all of the information. It’s better to start with a question and then look for the answer in your analytics. First, ask yourself: what is working and what isn’t working?

For the items that are working, you want to push them more and optimize these channels. There is no guarantee that optimizing poor performing areas will equal an increase in revenue. However, increasing the conversion rate on areas of your site that are already performing will have a bigger impact. Plus, a lot of the time, these areas are the popular areas of your site. This means you’ll be able to get more traffic for your testing which equates to faster results.

For the items that are not working, what could be possible ways to improve? Where are people leaving and what isn’t working for those top performers? Look into what would work, what could work, and what should work.

After you have your questions, next, identify improvement opportunities through your analytics.

A good place to start is popular pages. These are the pages seen by most of your website visitors. They could be category, internal search, or a specific product. The important thing is to identify them, how much revenue they generate, and what their current conversion rate is. From there, you can see how much you stand to gain by improving that page’s conversion rate. This also prevents you from spending too much time on a page that gives a small lift in revenue. These help you quickly identify what is working on your site.

Popular paths help answer “what isn’t working” with a narrow focus. They go great when paired with popular pages. The paths are the most frequent ways your customers navigate through your site. They help you identify which paths work and which ones don’t. Popular paths also give you more information about your popular pages (from above). Once you identify what your popular pages are, you can view that paths to and from those pages to help understand why customers might be leaving or what is needed for customers to make a buying decision.

Your page type breakdown is a big one. Is traffic hitting your category or product pages the most? Which ones convert better? How do their bounce rates compare? Answering these questions help you identify sitewide issues. Maybe your navigation is confusing or your product pages don’t sell the product. This breakdown is a great way to get started and dive in. Since the popular paths is such a narrow focus, this gives you a broader, sitewide spectrum to see which page types might be working or not working.

Once you answer the questions on the previous slide with the data from these parts of your site, you are ready to start with your test ideas.

So, to help understand your site, look at your:

Popular pages

Paths

Page type breakdowns

They will help you identify:

What is working

What isn’t working

What would/could/should work

And that’s where your testing comes in. Testing your would/could/should items turns them into “will” or “won’t” help items.
These are a few of the ways we approach testing at Exclusive Concepts. Conversion Booster is an Exclusive Concepts full-service testing option . We do the work for you by gathering your analytics and determining optimal changes for your site to maximize conversion rate. Then, we test those changes in an AB or Multivariate test and present you with the winning combinations! Its that simple. Give us a call at 1-800-504-4324 if you’re interested in learning more.

We would be honored to perform a free conversion audit on your qualified website today.

If you have any questions about conversion booster, website testing, or website optimization, be sure to let us know. Email us today at: blog@exclusiveconcepts.com.